Subject: [P2PSIP] comments on draft-ietf-p2psip-diagnostics-01

From: Bruce Lowekamp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:45:58 +0200

I liked most of the changes that were made since the previous
revision.  A few comments on this draft:

It can't use the IPR declaration that it's using.  There is material
in here from other drafts (the old diagnostics text) that was
submitted prior to 11/2008 and has not been officially reassigned
under the new terms.

The draft refers to Inspect as Ping.  Since there's a Ping method in
RELOAD, this is very confusing, especially since I think we've
discussed adding a NodeFetch method to support such applications
periodically.

There currently isn't an option for processing by on-path peers as
discussed by 5.4.2.  That could be added as a ForwardingOption.
Personally I don't like it and would oppose requiring it, but I think
that's the right way to proceed with such an idea.

This draft could really benefit from a few detailed examples of how to
use some of the specific elements.  Right now there are ways to query
for a lot of different information, but it's not completely clear
which elements should be selected for inclusion.  For example, you can
detect some misrouting with some of these methods, but doing so is
quite hard.

I think we may want to raise the question of error_info/sub-codes to a
separate thread on the  list for a general discussion.  Given that we
have 16 bits for error codes in RELOAD, I'm not sure sub-codes are
really needed.

Path_Track is sort of a merger of RouteQuery and Fetch.  The
motivation for defining it as a separate method is, I think, that if
you're trying to diagnose route instability, it's helpful to be able
to ask those two questions simultaneously before the route changes
again.  The draft should be a bit clearer on motivating that.